I’ve been spending the last few hours trying to register a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine during kickstart. What I wanted to achieve:

• Kickstart
• Register the machine with certificate based method (subscription-manager)
• Install Puppet which will take care of the remainder of the configuration.

The really short version

This all goes into your anaconda kickstart file. Replace USERNAME and PASSWORD or use activation key (haven’t tested):

# register
echo "registering with redhat using certificate method"
subscription-manager register --username=USERNAME --password=PASSWORD --autosubscribe

# update all the base packages from the updates repository, also important since
# yum-config-manager doesn't function until you do something with yum!
echo "updating machine"
yum -t -y -e 0 update

# add optional red hat repository needed for puppet
echo "adding optional repository"
yum-config-manager --enable rhel-6-server-optional-rpms

# install epel if we can
echo "configuring epel repository"
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/beta/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

# install puppet
echo "installing puppet"
yum -t -y -e 0 install puppet

The LONG version

Why certificate based?

I haven’t confirmed yet, but hoping that the new content delivery framework “cdn.redhat.com” is a lot faster here in Iceland (currently ~200-300KBps).

On with the butter! (Icelandic saying)

The old way used to be:

rhnreg-ks --username <username> --password <password>

New way, autosubscribe tries to enable to correct subscription automatically:

subscription-manager register --username=<username> --password=<password> --autosubscribe

OK Great, now I’m subscribed, on to installing puppet

First we need the epel repository to get puppet

The EPEL repository contains lots of extra package for rhel including puppet.

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/beta/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

On to the tricky stuff

puppet is in the epel repo, check. But it requires libselinux-ruby which is in the rhel-6-server-optional-rpms repository so installing puppet without enabling it will blow up because of dependency problems.

Enabling rhel-6-server-optional-rpms

Old version (pre 6.1) used rhn-channel, we use the new tools. Now here is what cost me quite some time. When you run “subscription-manager register” I think that the /etc/yum.repos.d/redhat.repo is not created. Not untill you run some yum commands, so that’s why I update here but I suspect any (install/update) command will do:

yum -y -e 0 update
yum-config-manager --enable rhel-6-server-optional-rpms

Finally, ready to rock and roll!

yum -y -e 0 install puppet

You should have a puppet ready on RHEL 6.1<

Decided to attach a picture of the damage that problems like these do to my hairstyle!